Movie review: Schwarzenegger's 'Sabotage' is bloody satisfying

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By Ed SymkusMore Content Now

Wayne Independent - Honesdale, PA

By Ed SymkusMore Content Now

Posted Mar. 28, 2014 at 2:00 AM

By Ed SymkusMore Content Now
Posted Mar. 28, 2014 at 2:00 AM

Money changes everything. The New Wave band the Brains had a cool song with that title and that message in 1980. Cyndi Lauper covered it and made it a hit a few years later. And though the song isn’t heard in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s new action film, “Sabotage,” the sentiment is sure there. It’s all about money, in this case the dirty lucre that drives people forward and can just as easily tear them apart.

After a brief intro of obviously distressed DEA undercover cop Breacher Wharton (Schwarzenegger) watching a video of a woman being tortured by masked thugs, the film jumps into high gear. Breacher leads his heavily armed special ops team on a raid at a mansion where there are millions of dollars of drug money. Gunfire fills the screen, bodies drop all over the place, Breacher loses one of his men ... but they find the cash, loads of it, and after stashing away about $10 million from the pile (yup, it’s made clear right away that these are kinda dirty DEA cops), they burn the rest.

But there’s a hitch or two: When they later return to pick up what they hid, it’s nowhere to be found, and somehow the Feds have discovered that a big chunk of the change has gone missing. So the film has two interesting set-ups: The FBI is convinced that Breacher and his crew took the money, and the drug cartel they took it from is convinced of the same thing.

Speaking as a fan of heist films and action films and, yes, I’ll admit it, big Arnold, I’ve gotta say it’s good to have him back where he belongs. But, fair warning, this is not the tough, vicious Arnold who regularly throws in a wisecrack for comic effect. He’s still tough and vicious, all right, but his Breacher is a grim character with nothing funny to say.

After six months of investigations into him and his crew, during which none of them breaks, orders come down to drop it all, to leave them alone and let them get back to work. After all, Breacher is known among his peers as a “drug war god,” so it’s no surprise to see him whipping his rusty crew back into shape and heading out into the streets to penetrate drug organizations.

That’s right about where the film’s real plot is set in motion, where things begin to go very wrong, where his undercover agents start to go down, one at a time. Let’s hand it to the writing team of Skip Woods and David Ayer, there are some gruesomely creative methods of death on display here, one involving a train, another the ceiling of a house. The question is, who’s doing this? The cartel people and their squads of Nicaraguan hit men? Jealous and angry FBI folks? No one knows, which is why Breacher and the remaining members of his crew find themselves dealing with paranoia, even while they continue to drink and goof around and try to maintain a sense of camaraderie. Then, added to the plot’s equation, there’s the introduction of FBI investigator Caroline Brentwood (curiously boyish-looking British actress Olivia Williams, sporting a darn good American Southern accent), trying to figure out why DEA agents are being killed.

Page 2 of 2 - Director David Ayer, who made the excellent and gritty “End of Watch,” keeps the story gripping, continually adds more layers of complications, and tosses in a bit of dazzle with an at first confusing, then eye-opening sequence showing both a crime and its aftermath taking place simultaneously, then goes back and does the same thing with a different set of circumstances later in the film.

It’s not till the halfway point that some major back story, involving the opening scenes, is brought upfront, which results in everything, in some ways, starting over again, from a different perspective. This is a very violent film, yet blood isn’t spilled from beginning to end. But when the guns do come out, the violence is intense and relentless. There’s also strong acting from Williams, and Arnold turns in one of his better performances, depending a lot more on believable delivery of dialogue than usual.

The last half-hour is crackling, featuring insane action, reveal after reveal of previously unexplained motives and decisions, even more complications, and a near-perfect coda that’s, as Williams might say if she were using British jargon, bloody satisfying.

Ed Symkus covers movies for More Content Now.

SABOTAGE Written by Skip Woods and David Ayer; directed by David Ayer With Arnold Schwarzenegger, Olivia Williams, Sam Worthington Rated R